Professors use celebrity courses to teach academic concepts

Image:  Elizabeth Scala knows that the best way to get burgeoning English majors interested in the British literary canon is by teaching the poetry of Shakespeare and Keats through a lens students care about: pop culture. For several years, she used the Harry Potter series as the cornerstone of her freshman English class at the University of Texas at Austin, a course that aims to introduce students to writing, research and analysis. This fall, however, she decided to take a new...